Muhlenberg College is cutting water bottle waste. It's an early adopter of bottle filling stations that are faster and more sanitary than drinking fountains.

Something is missing from the cafeteria tables at Allentown's Muhlenberg College, where hundreds of students are dining one recent spring day.

Plastic water bottles.

You can find students drinking water with their lunches, but they are using reusable bottles they fill at water fountains.

The stations are not common water fountains. Many of the machines on campus are equipped with bottle-filling stations that allow students to top off with free, filtered water in just about 5 seconds.

An Illinois company, Elkay, is trying to revolutionize the water fountain with the EZH2O stations. Its device caters to two growing trends: an awareness of the health benefits of drinking more water instead of soft drinks and the need to reduce the amount of plastic waste accumulating in the planet's oceans and landfills.

Worried about germs? You don't have to touch a handle or button. The machine is activated by a sensor that detects a bottle as soon it is placed in front of it, and stops after 20 seconds in case the person is distracted.

Don't like to see plastic water bottles thrown out? Each filling station also features a counter, displaying the total bottles that have been refilled, as an encouragement to environmentalists.

Muhlenberg was a big early customer. The college spent nearly $50,000 to install the machines around campus in 2010.

Elkay, which says it has installed the new fountains in hundreds of colleges and at least 15 airports, was not immediately able to provide a list of other Lehigh Valley customers. One is the Planet Fitness health center at the Tilghman Square Shopping Center in South Whitehall, which installed an EZH2O water fountain in September. It already has refilled more than 151,000 bottles.

The nearly 50 machines at Muhlenberg College have refilled the equivalent of 1.4 million water bottles since the program began, Maureen Brennan, a spokeswoman for Elkay confirmed.

The college has gained national attention for leading what many consider to be a national trend, as more colleges take measures to reduce waste.

The idea emerged during one of the courses at Muhlenberg in 2008. At first, students wanted to ban plastic water bottles altogether. But the threat of eliminating a popular product from campus aroused considerable resistance from students.

"Initially people were angry because they wanted their bottled water," says Cimarron Sharon, a junior in neuroscience who belongs to EnAcT, a student organization that led the "Just Tap It" campaign.

EnAcT stressed the environmental advantages of eliminating bottles. But the student government was still not completely sold on the idea. Eventually, the student activists changed strategies, says Diana Ortiz, who was EnAcT's vice president at the time.

They held blind tests, challenging students to taste the difference between tap water and bottled water. Few could. They emphasized that most plastic bottles are not recycled and that it is wasteful to use oil and additional water to package a product that can be obtained for free.

"Water is a precious resource," says the college's sustainability coordinator, Kalyna A. Procyk. "There is no reason to use it for pointless aims."

Students lobbied dining services to remove it from the meal plan and diminish its advertising.

By the end of 2009, says Ortiz, the activists had convinced enough of their peers to persuade the student government to change the policy. The college installed the bottle-filling stations in 2010, and freshmen get a stainless steel water bottle.

The once-controversial change has become part of the routine, Sharon says. Bottled water sales have dropped 90 percent since the new policies.

"The inconvenience of carrying around a water bottle is actually not that big of a deal," Procyk says.